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Greg was blown away by Candace. He was so impressed that he blew off a college professor friend he’d also invited to the concert. “He told me later, ‘You disappeared.’ And I said, ‘Well, did


you see her?’ He couldn’t argue with that. ‘Yeah, yeah, you're right.’” Their first date led to a second, and then a third and fourth. Three years later, in 2006, they got married. And


22 years after that first email exchange, they’re still together. “We couldn’t be happier,” Candace says. Greg, who’s now a retired music teacher, still believes that the reason they


connected on a dating site, and why their relationship continues to thrive, was their honesty. “In my Match profile, I wrote that I was having a perfectly fine, wonderful life, but it’d be


nice to have somebody to share it with,” he says. “And that was the truth.” Dave and Karen Hurwitt pose with their family in Connecticut in 2024. Dave feels like it was easier to write a


dating profile as a middle-aged divorcee than when he was 20 years younger: “We have more clarity about who we are and what we’re looking for in a partner.” Courtesy Karen Hurwitt ‘PEOPLE


OUR AGE HAVE … A HIGHER LEVEL OF SELF-AWARENESS’ Nineteen years ago, a recently widowed Karen Hurwitt had all the perfect excuses for why she shouldn’t try dating again. “I've got this


career going, and my kid needs to be shuttled between soccer practices, and I just don't have time,” she says. Although she was just in her mid 30s, Hurwitt was “convinced that I’d


never find love again.”  When her girlfriends suggested online dating during a dinner party at her home in Charlotte, Vermont, Karen immediately rejected it. But after a few glasses of wine,


her friends lured her to the computer and helped her compose a rough draft for her dating app profile. When she posted it the next morning, her inbox was flooded with responses. A few dates


went nowhere, but then she got a message from Dave Hurwitt, a recent divorcee around her same age, with two young children of his own. “The thing that really won me over was that everything


in his email was spelled correctly,” says Karen, who’s now 54. “I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is gorgeous and he knows how to spell?’” Karen and Dave's Match.com profiles Courtesy Karen


Hurwitt “I should’ve proposed right there and then,” Dave, now 55, quips. Dave feels like it was easier to write a dating profile as a middle-aged divorcee than when he was 20 years younger.


“We have more clarity about who we are and what we’re looking for in a partner,” he says. “One of the keys is authenticity,” Karen adds. “Don’t try to script something that makes you look


more appealing. Just be true to who you are, and that’ll come through.” Karen agreed to a date after confessing to him that her life was complicated; she was raising a kid alone and still


grieving her late husband. “She said, ‘I’ll give you five minutes. And if we don’t feel it, let's just call it a night and go home,’” Dave remembers. “We went out on a Monday night, and


three and a half hours later, we were still talking.” “I had to call the babysitter twice and promise that I wasn't abandoning my child,” Karen recalls with a laugh.